David Boyer: Fighting Outages with Fault Finding

July 5, 2012
Reducing outages is important on many levels; power is necessary for comfort, convenience and safety. But bringing down outage times is important to revenue as well.

Reducing outages is important on many levels; power is necessary for comfort, convenience and safety. But bringing down outage times is important to revenue as well. “Outages create headlines and headaches for utilities,” according to David Boyer, regional manager of High Voltage, Inc. That’s why he is helping to train utilities to quickly find faults and not cause future ones.

Boyer will be presenting the session, Medium Voltage Cable Fault Locating Basics, at Doble Engineering Co.’s 2012 Cables Seminar: From Design to Diagnostics, on July 31-Aug. 2 in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Locating faults in cables is another diagnostic method and the lines between fault locating and cable testing often get blurred. The session will look at different technologies and how they have changed over the years and review modern fault locating techniques. It includes a basic overview of the theory and practices used in cable fault location including capacitive discharge, TDR, acoustic and magnetic pinpointing.

“Being proficient at solving these problems and getting industries and households back to normal is essential,” Boyer said.

Boyer has presented many VLF, cable diagnostic, and fault location sessions at Doble, Mesa, Neetrac, NETA, and utility engineering conferences. He will also be presenting a cable diagnostic paper at the 2013 Doble Users’ Group in Boston and Wind Farm Cable Testing in Brazil in the fall of 2012.

He has spent his entire career in the world of electrical test equipment and the operation, maintenance, and repair of electrical equipment. In high school he worked in the manufacturing department of Hipotronics. In fact, his career choice was a “foregone conclusion,” he said, as he was building Thumpers (a type of motorcycle engine) in high school.

After high school, Boyer served for six years in the Navy as a Nuclear Electrician on board the fast attack submarine U.S.S. Gato. He specialized in switchgear repair and refurbishment, training, and quality assurance procedures.

His post-Navy career brought him to a NETA testing company, Advanced Testing Systems Inc., where he specialized in cable testing and fault location for over seven years. Boyer previously worked with Hipotronics, joining the sales and training team as the North American manager. In 2004 he reunited with the Peschel family at High Voltage Inc. He is currently the sales manager and responsible for field testing worldwide in the VLF, Tan Delta, and Cable Fault Location platforms. He is also an active member of the NEETRAC CDFI study.

His position and experience helps him to relate the subject matter he is teaching to the end user. He tells students that preparation is the key to success. “Knowing that your test set-up is perfect allows you to trust the results you get,” he said.

Boyer likes to see success; he said he loves to help people understand there are solutions for the questions and the problems that are plaguing them.

When he is not helping people solve problems, he golfs, hikes, canoes and rides his motorcycle, a 2003 Softail Heritage Springer from Harley Davidson.

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